He's a familiar figure in the small music store in central Tel Aviv. For years he has been coming to the store every day. He comes in, adjusts his black sunglasses and heads for the Bob Dylan section. For a few minutes he riffles silently through the CDs and then turns on his heel and leaves without saying a word. Over time, the frustrated curiosity of the salespeople drove them to play mischievous practical jokes on the silent non-client. Sometimes they reorganized the shelves just so they could glance at the man sidelong as he looked around, perplexed, until he relocated his target. In their despair they even moved the Dylan section to the other side of the store, but not even that trick ruffled the man's imperturbability.

About a month ago, the day Dylan's new album, "Modern Times," was released in Israel, the dam finally burst. The man came in and, contrary to his long-established tradition, walked right past the "D" shelf and asked, in a pronounced English accent, if "the new Dylan has already come in." In response to the affirmative reply he walked over to the shelf, pondered long and hard whether to take the special limited edition with four bonus DVDs, paid for the regular CD, and left. The next day he came back and silently did his usual number.

"Another five years of flipping through the CDs have started," one of the salespeople muttered and went about his business.

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Mindset

Dylan is not the first or the last object of adulation in the pop-rock culture, or even the heaviest. The Elvis cult was more widespread, Beatlemania was more vociferous, the heavy-rock bands demanded a tougher bodily commitment, and a string of teen idols stimulated stormier passions. The thing about Dylan has to do with a "mindset," as Ahik Guper puts it. Dylanmania is a psychological disorder.

"The love for Dylan is silent within me, it does not prattle the whole day," says Guper, 38, a Bible teacher from Tivon. Guper is married and the father of two. "It's the same way that I breathe but don't notice it every second. He taught me how to look at the world, at life and at people in a certain way. He is the soundtrack of my life. Our wedding song, 'Emotionally Yours,' was his. I check every new sound system with 'Infidels.' My students know the collection of shirts and absorb the quotes. I hope that as a teacher I somehow foment in them a tempest like the one he generated in me. The half-hour I have with him every morning, alone on the road on the way to work, are the minutes when I am closest to myself. I would not give them up for anything in the world."

The conversation with Guper is held in the music studio of his friend Ehud Tsahar, also a devotee. Playing in the background are the three choice cuts from "Modern Times" (6, 8 and 10 - the panel is unanimous). Guper and Tsahar, childhood friends of the same age, have gone through a lot together, always with Dylan in the background, but the present encounter reveals, surprisingly, that they have different positions.

Tsahar feels "let down" by Dylan in recent years. He is disappointed with his last few albums and is angry at the country-rockabilly demeanor that Dylan, who was born Robert Zimmerman, adopted in the past decade ("Look at him, dressed like a cowboy"). "Dylan is having us on. He just doesn't feel like making an effort to write really good songs anymore, like Neil Young does," says Tsahar. He even spoils the party by forcing us to watch a clip of a lovely song from Young's next-to-last CD. As a soundman he is furious over Dylan's decision to produce his last two albums ("Modern Times" and "Love and Theft," 2001) himself under a pseudonym, "Jack Frost," without a producer. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine before "Modern Times" was released, Dylan said no one else knows how he is supposed to sound. But in the room a sigh of longing is heard for Daniel Lanois, the meta-producer who brought Dylan his two greatest achievements in the past 30 years - "Oh Mercy" (1989) and "Time Out of Mind" (1997). It's a triple sigh.

I contacted the odd couple as part of the second - therapeutic - stage of my personal attempt to cope with my obsession. I suppose I was looking for a support group, or maybe I wanted to learn healing methods from people with experience. This was preceded by the diagnostic stage, of identifying the problem. I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when affection and esteem for the man became a pathology, but the warning lights were blinking all along the route of memory. For example, the evening when I implored my wife to shut off the TV so we could drink something and listen to a little music, and she responded scornfully, "Oh, really, and what will we listen to? More Dylan? Wow."

Or the evening I went to the CD rack and discovered the Dylan section was blocked by a "No Entry" sign that my younger brother had painted and stuck there. Also documented were repetitive mumblings of key phrases from songs, the rapid and irresponsible purchase of all 31 studio albums to close a gap caused by a late start (not including live performances, collections and bootlegs later officially laundered), and the constant bothering of distant acquaintances - or total strangers - over whether they had seen "No Direction Home," Martin Scorsese's hypnotic film about Dylan, and read "Chronicles Volume I," an autobiography probably unexampled in the history of popular music.

And there was also the incident with Goni, my 7-year-old son, who one summer day came home singing a ditty he had picked up from his pals: "Ya'allah Nasrallah / We'll screw you insh'allah / We'll send you back to Allah / With all that Hezbollah." After listening to this a few times very tolerantly, I suggested we move to songs of peace and love, as befits the values we abide by in this house. "But I think it's the most moving song that's come out this year," he snapped back, in those very words. "Fine, I disagree," I informed him. "Why, because you and your Dylan like different songs?" he asked mockingly and went to play with his Lego set.

The whole street hears

At least I'm not alone. If Dylan is an ocean, the Internet is constructing numberless ports along its shores. Large numbers of fanatics of all genders and colors offer their wares on the Web, devotedly maintaining sites that illustrate the range of symptoms of the illness. They range from Olof Bjorner, from Sweden, who manages a vast compendium of information about the history of Dylan's recordings and performances (www.bjorner.com), to Bill Pagel, from Duluth, Minnesota - the place where Dylan got his start - who tracks Dylan's 200 or so concerts a year (www.my.execpc.com); the site has had more than 14 million visitors from more than 166 countries and territories since going online exactly 11 years ago.

Meir Talbi, from Kibbutz Netiv Halamed Heh, has a story about Dylan and two female volunteers. Talbi, a divorced 46-year-old economist, sits in a cafe in the London Ministore in Tel Aviv and picks at a poppy-seed cake. He declares he feels nothing special for Dylan, really. He's not a collector; all he has are the 31 official studio and six live performance recordings (on CDs), plus the bootlegs (eight) laundered a few years ago. "I came to the kibbutz in 1982, after the Lebanon War," he recalls. "All I wanted was quiet. There were two volunteers, Lorraine and Nancy, working in the orchard. They introduced me to 'Blood on the Tracks' and I started to get involved. I remember being floored by 'Idiot Wind.' I had loved music since I was a teenager, and I saved money bit by bit to buy records, but I had never heard anything like that. From there I kept going and never stopped."

Over the years those around him became familiar with his craving for all things Dylan. That probably wasn't very hard, given his habit of dropping Dylan one-liners into conversations. "If someone made a remark about the weather, I would come back with 'You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,' and so forth." Sometimes he was seen mumbling Dylanesque thoughts to himself on the trails of the kibbutz. A few former volunteers sent him every new book that came out about Dylan. When his son was born, the kibbutz members bought him fancy earphones, but it didn't really help. "I must be the first person whose mother, father and children shouted at him to turn down the volume, because the whole street could hear," he says.

He is refusing to surrender in the war of attrition with the next generation, and is adopting stratagems. "My son, who is 13, plays the guitar. I told him, 'Do you dig Hendrix? Come and listen to Clapton. Do you dig Clapton? Then check out Mark Knopfler. Did you dig Knopfler? You should know he plays on Dylan's "Infidels" and "Slow Train Coming." Would you like to listen to them?'

"The strangest thing was," he continues, suddenly turning serious, "was that one day I met Nancy and Lorraine after they had left the kibbutz. 'Infidels' had just been released and I asked them enthusiastically what they thought about it. It turned out they hadn't even heard about it." So, what's the problem with a classic case of the pupil exceeding the teacher, I remark. "I would describe it more as betrayal," he replies laconically.

Then he reminisces a little about Dylan concerts, particularly his first concert in Israel (1987), which gained notoriety because of Dylan's uncommunicativeness and inconsiderate selection of songs. "What a catastrophe. I loved it." As we are about to part, he tries to explain the secret of Dylan's charm. "I identify with his approach to life: 'I am who I am, take it or leave it.'" On the stairs going out, next to the cafe's cashier, he relates that he integrates Dylan quotes into his professional presentations. "At the beginning, the middle and the end; it thaws the atmosphere," he says.

Resurrection

Dylan has always been what's known as a "musician's musician." In his autobiography he complains about the excessive preoccupation with his texts and says true musicians are taken first of all with his musical creativity, but unfortunately most of the public does not consist of musicians. As it happens, in the Israeli community of Dylan devotees, which has several thousand members - almost all of them men - there are quite a few musicians. One of the most prominent of them is Yehuda Edar.

Edar, who was a member of the legendary Israeli rock group Tamuz, is a very busy and highly regarded music producer. He was director of the Rimon School of Jazz and Contemporary Music in Ramat Hasharon, and is now in charge of one of the school's tracks. Sitting in a cafe near his Tel Aviv home, he peruses his binders feverishly, pulling out Dylan texts and Internet printouts. He has come prepared. In our conversations over the past few years, Dylan always somehow cropped up as an aside, but now he's the main topic. At the age of 56, Edar is wrapping up many years of work on his first solo album, and has recently finished recording two Dylan songs that he translated and which will be on the album.

Edar is one of many Israeli musicians who have publicly declared their love for Dylan. Topping the list, of course, is his deceased friend Meir Ariel, who recorded a Hebrew concert version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Other performers who have sung Dylan in Hebrew are Ehud Banai, Hemi Rodner, Shlomi Shaban, Aviv Geffen and of course Danny Litani, a good friend of Edar's who has been singing Dylan in Hebrew for years.

I went to Edar because I thought that as the former director of a music school, he would be able to provide a theoretical-academic diagnosis of the affliction. Very quickly it became clear that the conversation was arriving at the usual Dylanesque place: the inability to translate the magic into words. "When I was 16 a friend came back to the kibbutz [Kfar Hanassi] from abroad and talked about Dylan for the first time," he says. "A year later, in 1967, volunteers from abroad started to arrive and brought records with them. At this stage I was living in a bubble. All I wanted to do was lock myself in my cabin with my record player and tape recorder. I would turn out the lights, and that would overwhelm me. What stunned me was the feeling - it's something I can't put into words. That's also why I never studied Dylan in depth, as I do as a teacher and producer. If Dylan dies before I do, I will sit shiva for him. He is so much a part of me. He pops up on so many occasions and always remains an enigma, a trapeze artist."

In the past decade Edar has experienced two acute revelations of Dylanmania. One was when he did a Dylan song at a festive performance and achieved an emotional transcendence that mesmerized the audience. The other was when a thrilled Yoav Kutner, the former radio announcer who is now the editor of the TV Music Channel, played "Time Out of Mind" - Dylan's latest resurrection album (he has died and returned from the grave in the past, too) - for him for the first time. That album rekindled the craze for Dylan, which is still going strong and has propelled the 65-year-old's new CD into first place on the U.S. charts. "At around the fourth song I fell asleep - it was apparently more than I was capable of absorbing," Edar says. "To this day Kutner kids me about how I dropped off the first time I heard 'Time Out of Mind.'"

Spies everywhere

In downtown Holon I try to find Bergen Belsen Martyrs Lane between peeling tenements and scrawny cats. Zadok Givertz got on my case in earlier phone calls, a few weeks before the release of "Modern Times," when he hinted anonymous sources had flown the whole album to him, far outdoing the three cuts that were released for radio by the distributor as an appetizer.

At least Givertz did not experience the frustration of many Israeli Dylanites when the album sold out in two days. In our small Tel Aviv music store, the new CD ousted the popular Israeli singer Keren Peles from the top-selling spot, and had it not been for the temporary shortage, it would have given even Ninette a good fight. Uzi Preuss, the repertoire director at NMC, squirms a bit and then admits, "Yes, we were caught with our pants down. All told, I think the few thousand people who bought the two previous albums will buy the new one, too - it won't exceed Dylan's regular sales pattern. What we didn't expect was the rapid response. People simply ran to the stores the minute they heard the CD was available, and that was the reason for the hitch."

There was no shortage of CDs in the United States, and Granddad Dylan astonished everyone when he sold 192,000 CDs in a week and easily vaulted into first place on the charts, exactly 30 years after he did it the last time, with "Desire." That amazing success can be attributed less to the quality of the album (which was initially unknown to the buyers) than to the tremendous expectation for "the new Dylan CD." It was fomented by a domino effect: the Grammy for that CD, the Oscar for that song, the book (which is at last being translated into Hebrew), and perhaps above all the Scorsese film.

The spontaneous hype can perhaps also explain the rave reviews for the album, which sometimes seemed almost to have been written in advance, or at least under advance assumptions. The more sober-minded actually agree it is not a masterpiece, but that it has three excellent songs. At the same time, an analytical groove cuts through it and the pleasure of the artist and his band from playing together is very apparent, the pleasure Dylan has talked about so much throughout his career. Dylan told Rolling Stone (in an interview with the novelist Jonathan Lethem), "I think I'm in my middle years now."

Givertz, in his small apartment, which is bursting with CDs, records, tapes and DVDs, will settle for "even three good songs." In his case, it's the generosity of the rich. At the age of 50 he has a truly impressive Dylan collection, maybe even by world standards. Sometimes it's a bit frightening. He has every album Dylan has ever released and with it the outtakes - the bare demo versions stolen from the studio during the sessions. He has hundreds of bootlegs from concerts, and runs an international network of secret agents who obtain for him every Dylan title released anywhere on the planet. For example, he has an extremely rare item, a numbered and valuable copy of something he vehemently refuses to reveal to the world. Forgive me, but I saw it and felt it, and then I fell asleep.

When I woke up, Givertz offered me three types of cookies. He's big on biscuits - and on monologues. "When I was 16 a friend played 'Blonde on Blonde' for me and I told him that either I would never want to hear it again, or I would never want to stop," he says. "Since then not a day goes by on which I don't listen to Dylan. If I didn't listen to him, it's as though I didn't pray. Have you ever seen a Jew who doesn't pray? Usually I listen to him when I come home from work, after the shower."

Givertz has worked for the National Insurance Institute for many years. He says his coworkers know about his craze, not least because of the poster in his office. I try to say that the day I go to the NII and find a huge poster of Bob Dylan on the wall behind the bored clerk will be the day I will start believing in Zionism again, but he is already well into occupational memories. "I spent the first salary I ever got from the NII on Dylan that very day," he says, and bursts into laughter. "When I got home, my father asked me, 'Well, did you get your salary?' I said, 'Yes, but it's not here. I used it to buy bootlegs.' In despair, he asked me what bootlegs were."

For many people, "Blood on the Tracks" - which in my view is Dylan's most fully rounded album - provided an opportunity to reconnect with him in the mid-1970s, after the peak of the previous decade and the retreat that followed. For Givertz, it possessed an additional meaning. "After my older brother was killed in the Yom Kippur War I stopped listening to music for a year. I just didn't feel like it. One day a friend came over and said something had come out that I had to hear. It was 'Blood on the Tracks.' That's how I got back to Dylan and I haven't left since."

It's amusing that even a Dylan freak like Givertz displays the denial motif. He claims that beyond the music he has no interest in the gossip about Dylan, but in the same breath he is capable of whipping out trivia and stories, which he always prefaces with "as everyone knows." No one knows. Dylan is a well-known biographical mystery. Hardly anything is even known about his five children (apart from Jakob, a musician in his own right). Givertz throws me a bone in the form of a rare photograph. It shows Dylan sitting at a table with two bearded rabbis, he in a satin suit and wearing a large skullcap. "Everyone knows his daughter studied here not long ago in a Jerusalem yeshiva," Givertz explains. "This photograph shows Dylan when he visited her for Shabbat. Someone got it to me, it doesn't matter how."

Like all the devotees, Givertz too maintains that he has no wish to meet the person who has taken control of his life. "I have a trauma. I once happened to be next to [legendary Israeli singer] Arik Einstein and I was terribly disappointed. Since then I have no desire to do things like that. Why would I want to spoil things?" It goes without saying that during Dylan's last secret visit to Israel, Givertz tried to nab him. "I got a tip in real time that he was going to visit the Western Wall. I rushed to Jerusalem and waited there the whole day, but he didn't show up."

Band of Dylans

Over the past few days, the situation seems to have been getting better. At least I have attained a certain equilibrium. I have left the interviews and the biographies and am reading a book that has nothing to do with Dylan, about a small decaying American town populated by weird characters. No connection at all. What does Dylan have to do with this kind of theme? I like that I am capable of criticizing the new album, even if not very aggressively. I even went back to listening to a little Shalom Hanoch for variety, and I think I have been singing less frequently the opening lines of "Idiot Wind" to myself, without any advance notice or discernible reason. Almost normative.

The Bible teacher, Ahik Guper, reassured me that this is what happens over the course of time and that all was well with me. On the other hand, I am not sure he is the one to ask for an objective diagnosis. Four years ago, when his friend Tsahar was in New York, they discovered both were expecting children who would be born around the same time. When the due date approached they spoke on the phone. "Ahik asked me if we had thought of a name already," Tsahar recalls. "I told him we had, and when I told him what it was he said I should take into account that there would be two of them."

So two Dylans came into the world two weeks apart. The mohel for Dylan Guper almost choked when he heard the baby's name, and the circumciser in New York was told this was a common Israeli name. Tsahar, the proud father whose relations with Bob are in something of a crisis, tries to persuade me that he and his wife chose Dylan because they like the sound of it, not necessarily because of that guy.

Later the two discovered they are not alone. Guper relates, "One day I'm in the supermarket and suddenly I hear a mother calling her son: 'Dylan, Dylan, come here already.' I then learned that there is also a small Dylan in Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek and another in Alonim. That's nice. It was always clear to me that one day I would give my child that name. From the first time I heard Dylan, at the age of 17, he tore me apart. He built another floor in my brain, infiltrated my soul. So this is a kind of closing of the circle, in a very physical form. When I call my son by his name I don't think of Bob Dylan, I think of the boy, but at the same time something that's right passes through the psyche."W